I am a webdesigner going Real estate the 9 months of not having your website up getting recognized on the search engines and getting your backlinks is worth alot, I would go with another designer it should no way take 9 months. Was there a deadline date decided on or a contract of any kind?

I would ask him to send you all of the work his done so far ( since you are paying for it its your property ) and ask for a bid and time fram to finish the project from other designers. If you will get a better bid make sure you have a rock solid proposal or a contract which describes the timeframe and penalties if the project is late. If you wont be satisfid with the bids just stick with the current guy

*** SPAM ***

One thing that no one has pointed out is this...

There is the saying that you can get only two of the following three things in anything:

Quality, Speed, & Affordable.

You said yourself that he does really great work and that it was affordable (bottom end of bid range) so that should have told you that this guy most likely isn't going to give you the speed you like. As corny as it sounds, it's almost ALWAYS true.

Give him some kind of ultimatum to get the project complated within the next 4 weeks or you are going to have to move on to another developer.

-J

Can you smell another rate 'renegotiation'?. Sounds like the old 'I've got what you need' routine. Be firm, call him up and tell him that the delay is becoming injurious to your efforts. Ask him to send you a copy of the project overview, indicating what is done and what remains. Go to the highest company level.

When one hires a company to code, do they write in that the company provides thorough documentation of the logic. What happens when your code fails to perform, or you find that it is not 'transportable'.

Investigate these avenues to see how much value you really have. A lot of coding is based on well known (and free) scripts, much of which is altered to either promote the provider, or contain the purchaser.

Did you sign a contract or anything else that specified a completion date or at least some way to measure progress over the life cycle of the project?

In my company it has been a mojor issue once getting designers to finish projects for our clients.
Now we have a great team of people who are dedicated to getting things done fast in order to have more projects and generate obviously a lot more revenue than they would otherwise had they taken their sweet time instead of meeting or beating a certain timeline.

I believe the problem was initially that we were relying on local web designers and programmers some of which were personal friends which made the whole management issue even harder.

I can only second the encouragement to look on some of the freelance forums since there are great ambitious people out there, some of them overseas.

http://www.talkfreelance.com/ here is another good one.

Noone should have to put up with designers stalling their projects. Once you start really looking, you will find that there is no shortage on talented and motivated people when you open your eyes to the global arena


Mike

Hi Sitetutor,

I agree that noone should have their project held hostage but I'd rather employ programmers from th good ole USA than send a dime of my money anywhere else. Sure I have to charge more since I have to pay a bit more than $7 an hour for programming but I have I in college and 3 more to follow starting next year and they're gonna need jobs when they get out of school [ ]

Just my personal feelings though. I'm sure there are good programmers elsewhere [ ]

hehe, yes I prefer fueling our own economy as well - absolutely